


Assoluta

by whelvenwings



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Ballet Dancer Castiel (Supernatural), F/F, Fem!Cas, Genderswap, Journalist Dean, fem!dean, fem!destiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 21:26:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3396920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whelvenwings/pseuds/whelvenwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deanna hates the fact that she's stuck writing articles on dumb gallery openings and operas, when she should be putting her expertise in classic rock to work. She's less than impressed when her latest assigned piece is a feature on an upcoming ballet production; after all, ballet is pretty lame and definitely not worth writing about - or at least, that's what Deanna thinks, until she sees the Firebird dance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assoluta

Deanna didn’t like ballet.

I mean, sure, she could respect it as an art form – from a distance, that is. Preferably from several miles. And with headphones on, so she couldn’t hear the dumb pretentious dancers obsessing over their pliés and pointes and all the other ooh-la-la’s. But her boss had ordered her to come down here, to the Boston Opera House – and so here she was. Reluctantly.

This wasn’t what Deanna had imagined herself doing when she joined the Boston Arthouse. She’d felt such a burst of excitement when Bobby Singer, Chief Editor, had called to tell her she’d got the job – god, that seemed a year ago now, not three weeks. Never mind that her expertise lay in music – no one in Boston knew more about the classic rock scene, but the higher-ups at the up-and-coming arts magazine insisted on sending her out to cover the most banal stories, frustratingly far from her area of knowledge. First it had been a Renaissance Art gallery opening in the suburbs, then a new museum exhibition on Dalí, and now – ballet. Freaking  _ballet._

Deanna grimaced and clutched her cooling coffee closer to her body as a gaggle of dancers pushed past her in the corridor, arguing shrilly about a lost pair of shoes. As far as Deanna could tell, the dancers did nothing  _but_ argue. She’d been here the best part of the afternoon, and it was starting to drive her insane. She made her way down the hall, sipping her coffee and pulling a face. Of course the coffee here wasn’t the good stuff.  _Nothing_ here was the good stuff. Sure, it looked great, but – it was all big stages and fancy dresses and shiny slippers and  _someday my Prince will come, and then we’ll die together tragically._ Deanna snorted, throwing her half-empty coffee cup into a trash can as she went past. Give her a dive bar, a cold beer and some washed-out guys in beat-up jeans making real music.  _That_ was the good stuff.

Deanna adjusted her handbag straps on her shoulder, pulling it open so that she could grab a stick of gum and rid her mouth of that thin, bitter coffee taste. She caught sight of her notepad as she closed up her bag again, and frowned at it as though that would fill it up with notes she could use to write this stupid piece. She had no knowledge of ballet, and no interest in it. Being here wasn’t helping; everyone was too busy to speak to her. Deanna had gathered that there was a big new production about to debut, which would explain why everyone from the dancers to the dressmakers to the poor harassed girl who’d brought her the disgusting coffee had the same slightly panicked expression as they flitted from studio to wardrobe to the stage and back again, like figures on a whirling carousel.

Deanna checked her watch as she pushed through the door into the lobby. Through the glass doors, she could see the street outside – the road to freedom, she couldn’t help thinking. She made up her mind; it was time to get out of this place. She could find out which ballet they were doing online, search the story on Wikipedia, make up a couple of quotes from the director – did ballets have directors? She’d have to check – about how great the show was going to be, and then  _bam,_ done. Done with the piece, and done with the magazine, too. Deanna had thought that she was really onto something good with the Boston Arthouse, but she wasn’t going to stick around if they couldn’t appreciate her talents and let her write about what she liked. It wasn’t as though she wouldn’t be able to find another job somewhere else – well, she knew how to bartend, if nothing else, right? And she tended to get hired wherever she applied because she was pretty, and easy to talk to. It wasn’t exactly living the dream, but it was more interesting than  _ballet._

“You’re not leaving?”

A cheery voice cut Deanna off just as she was about to push her way through the doors and back out into the normal world, the world that she knew, with not a sequin or dusty velvet seat in sight. She groaned internally but turned round to face the guy who’d spoken, a young intern who’d met her here in the lobby at the start of the afternoon and pointed her towards the auditorium, where several dancers had been practising their steps.

“Yeah, I am,” Deanna said, smiling at the intern as brightly and confidently as she could. “I think I got everything I need to write a kickass piece. Or, you know, whatever the ballet equivalent of kickass is.”

“Don’t you think ballet’s kickass?” the intern asked, smiling up at her. He was a short kid, with big dark eyes and a winning grin. What had his name been, Deanna tried to remember – Kyle? Keith?

“Sure,” she lied. “It’s great. Anyway, I’d better be going. Nice to meet you, uh…”

“Kevin,” the intern supplied, his smiling taking on a slightly cooler edge. “You know, you haven’t even seen the dancing studios yet, right? You should definitely take a look before you leave. One of the soloist’s down there right now, you’ll be able to see her training.”

“Right, a soloist,” Deanna said, chewing her gum as she tried to figure out a way to escape. Nothing occurred to her, and Kevin was looking at her with wide sharp eyes that didn’t miss a trick. He’d read her piece when it came out, Deanna thought, and he’d know if she made up quotes. He might even complain to her editor. Maybe she could go down to the studios, get this soloist ballerina to say something nice about the show, and then exit, stage left. Or rather, exit, pursued by a Kevin.

“Alright, let’s go,” Deanna said, following it up with a smile when she realised she’d sounded less than thrilled. “Show me your Prima Ballerina.”

“She’s not a Prima Ballerina,” Kevin corrected, beginning to walk back into the Opera House complex. Deanna cast one more longing look back over her shoulder at the outside world before following him, resisting the urge to roll her eyes as he continued to lecture her on the correct terminology for ballet dancers. “That’s a title only used for the most famous and skilled dancers, the ones that are recognised internationally – like Anna Pavlova or Misty Copeland. It’s the second-highest title awarded to ballet dancers, only Prima Ballerina Assoluta is better. And –”

“Yeah, that’s great,” Deanna interrupted. “Super interesting. How far away are the studios?”

“Just down here,” Kevin replied, his expression unimpressed. Deanna knew she was being rude, but it hardly mattered. It wasn’t as though she were planning on ever coming back here after today, and Kevin’s ballet chatter was grating on her nerves. They descended a flight of steps together, Deanna regarding the chipped white paint on the walls with distaste. If they were going to be pretentious and gaudy, they might as well do the thing properly from top to bottom.

“Through this door,” Kevin said, gesturing for Deanna to go through first. She snapped an air bubble in her gum and pushed the door open, stepping through it. At first she couldn’t quite make sense of the room: it was dark and carpeted, with two large screens on one wall – no, not screens, Deanna realised, but windows. On the other side of the glass was a much larger, brightly-lit room. The walls were stark white, and the ceiling was high. At first, Deanna thought that it was empty – but as she walked further into the darkened viewing room, she realised that there was someone inside. A ballerina.

She was standing absolutely still, facing away. For a split second, Deanna thought that perhaps she was a statue, not a person; her muscles stood out in strong contours, and her dark hair was gathered in a sleek roll at the nape of her long, long neck. She wore a simple leotard, perfectly white, and a pair of matching ballet slippers; she was standing on the very tips of her toes, utterly unmoving, looking as though Michelangelo might have just finished carving her out of marble.

And then she moved, making Deanna gasp aloud.

It was the barest gesture; a fluting hand, sweeping a stark circle through the air – and yet with that one, simple movement, Deanna felt her heart beat faster. Deanna reached up a hand and pressed it against the window. The smoothness, the coolness of the glass against her hand felt as though it matched the sensation of watching the dancer; Deanna saw a little shiver ripple over her shoulders, as though she were shaking off the marble in her body, releasing herself slowly from the forced stillness.

“Who is she?” Deanna asked, her voice a little husky. Kevin, standing several paces behind her, answered softly.

“Her name is Castiel Novak,” he said. “She dances Firebird.”

“She – she’s beautiful,” Deanna said. As though sensing her words, her stare, the dancer half-turned her head; Deanna’s breath was taken again. The ballerina’s profile was beautiful – more beautiful than any other face Deanna had ever seen, without exception. Her lips were full and pink, soft blushing rose petals; her cheekbones were high, almost austere, but there was a delicacy to her brows and nose that softened them. Her eyes were closed, and even from here Deanna could see the way her lashes swept her cheek, dark on light, perfect and physically stunning and totally, entrancingly beautiful…

And then Castiel began to dance, and Deanna forgot what beautiful even  _meant._ She’d used the word a thousand times in her life before now, but this – this was – Deanna was certain that this was the only  _truly_ beautiful thing that she’d ever seen in her life.

Castiel danced without purpose, without self-consciousness. She didn’t tell a story; she  _was_ the story. Her every gesture, the simplest of her movements, were so filled with power that Deanna felt it like a wave; she flicked her wrist, and Deanna felt herself reel, she spun, and Deanna felt herself spinning with her, unravelling on the inside like a cassette’s tape spooling onto the floor. She was poetry, she was – she leapt and Deanna almost gasped. She was music that you could see. Her body was suddenly still – and then falling, was the rock thrown into water – rising, was the wave across the water’s surface. Deanna’s breath was steam on the glass, she was so close to it. The dancer was close to the window, too, now; her spins were bringing her nearer and nearer, her eyes still closed, her hands drawing out silver shapes… Deanna felt as though the dancer were speaking a language that her mind didn’t understand, but her body did. She felt her heart beat harder with every accent, every sharp turn – and then seem to turn to pure water, filling up her chest, whenever the ballerina was in spinning motion, pooling over the floor like liquid mercury. Deanna kept half-expecting her to sublime, to reach the end of a motion and simply transcend, become light itself or something more pure, beyond the human eye, the mortal reach.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Deanna heard Kevin say, from somewhere miles in the distance. She nodded, unable to speak, and found that her eyes were full of tears. She’d swallowed her gum.

In the studio, the dancer had come to a halt, this time facing the window. Her face was as smooth and unlined as before; she hadn’t once changed her expression. She hadn’t needed to, Deanna thought. Her body was a vessel of pure power; she was energy incarnate. She didn’t need to pull faces, show emotion. She was the cause of feeling, not the one who felt.

 _I have to write about her,_ Deanna thought.  _I have to write this piece properly, and it has to be about her._

As Deanna thought this, the dancer’s eyes snapped open.

They met Deanna’s instantly, without having to search, as though Castiel had known exactly where to find her. For a moment, Deanna was frozen by her stare – of course her eyes were bright blue, looking as deep and flat and cool and pure as clear skies over Russian snows. They were twin windows, Deanna thought, standing in the room with twin windows. She lifted her hand off the glass, and hesitantly waved it, a clumsy, awkward gesture. The ballerina blinked, and cocked her head to one side. The spell was broken.

“You – you dance beautifully,” Deanna said, loudly, so that the dancer would hear her through the glass. “You dance so beautifully. You look like a poem, uh, not that I – know that many poems, not really my area, but – you’re like the guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven – no, better than that, hell, I don’t know –” Deanna knew she was rambling. Her cheeks reddening, she fell silent. The ballerina was frowning a little, her arched brows drawn down; she walked a little closer to the glass, cupping a hand to her ear and shaking her head.

“You can’t hear me?” Deanna said, more than a little relieved. She stared at the dancer for a second, before pulling her bag off her shoulder and rummaging in it, seizing a pen and tearing a sheet of paper roughly from her notepad. She rested the paper up against the window, putting her tongue between her teeth as she thought about what to write. The dancer was standing still, her expression completely neutral, waiting. Deanna met her eyes for a moment, trying to decide which of the hundred thoughts in her head she wanted to say – and then settled for scribbling a quick question, her handwriting atrocious but hopefully legible. She capped the pen and turned the piece of paper round, so that the dancer could read what she’d written:

_Can we talk?_

Castiel’s eyebrows raised in surprise. She looked back up at Deanna’s face for a moment, perfectly still and composed as she considered. After a moment, she dipped her head once. She lifted her hand, pointing to a door at the end of the room that Deanna had completely missed, captivated as she was from the first by the dancer herself; Deanna crumpled up the note in her hands as she walked towards it, her heart beating fast. Would Castiel even speak English? Weren’t most ballet dancers from Russia, or something? What if they couldn’t understand each other at all?

Deanna pushed open the door. She walked over to the dancer, her clunky boots scraping the floor, feeling like a dirt stain on a white shirt or a nightmare inside someone else’s daydream.

“Uh, hi,” she began, as she came face to face with the dancer. She was just a little shorter than Deanna, and up close, she wasn’t so entirely sculptured perfection; she was sweating, with strands of her dark hair sticking to her forehead and a sheen all across her chest, starting to make a tiny damp patch on the front of her leotard. Deanna felt herself relax a little.

“Hello,” the dancer said, mercifully in English. “My name is Castiel Novak. Who are you?”

She spoke bluntly and without inflection; so much so that, even though her accent was flawless, Deanna found herself wondering if English was Castiel’s second language.

“I’m Deanna Winchester,” she replied, reaching out her hand with a nervous smile. Castiel’s grip was tight when she shook Deanna’s hand, her expression grave and unchanging. God, she was still  _so_ beautiful, Deanna thought, even when she wasn’t dancing. Her body looked so strong and lithe, curving in a little at the waist and out again at the hips, shown off perfectly by the figure-hugging leotard. “I was watching you dance just now, and… you were incredible. I mean, you  _are_ incredible.”

“Thank you,” Castiel replied, accepting the compliment with a trace of confusion. “Why were you watching me train?”

“Oh, right, yeah. Well, see, the thing is, I work for the Boston Arthouse – it’s a magazine, kinda new.”

“I read it,” Castiel said. “It’s very impressive that you work there.”

“Oh – well – no, it’s not – it’s really not that impressive,” Deanna replied, stumbling, hating her cheeks for turning red again. “It’s no big deal. They’ll take just about anyone. Well, they must do if they hired me.” She laughed nervously, and then cleared her throat. “Um. Uh, not that I’m – bad at writing, I just, uh, I’m fresh out of college, so it was a pretty big break.”

“Me, too,” Castiel said, smiling a little for the first time – just the tiniest upturn of her soft pink lips that set Deanna’s heart racing all over again. “You must be very excited.”

“It’s OK,” Deanna compromised, sparing Castiel the details of her issues with the magazine. In fact, now that she thought about it, those issues seemed surprisingly small. Why had she been bitching about coming to do a ballet piece? This was  _exactly_ where she was supposed to be. “Anyway, they want me to do an article on the ballet production that’s coming up. I’m not very, uh, knowledgeable about ballet, so I was trying to figure out my angle, and then I saw you dancing, and…” Deanna swallowed. “I was wondering if you’d let me write the piece about – about you.”

Castiel went quiet, looking down at the floor pensively. Deanna shifted her weight from one foot to the other, looking down at her. How had she managed to make herself look like water, like air? She was as much flesh and blood as Deanna was. And then again… even now, there was a touch of the ethereal about her, in the way she held herself, in the brightness of her eyes. Deanna thought that if she tried to touch her, she’d feel like lightning. Or maybe her hand would just pass right through, as though Castiel were just a column of light.

“I don’t normally speak to the press,” Castiel said, after a moment.

“Oh,” Deanna said. She felt a little chink of disappointment open in her chest. “Right.”

“I prefer to let the dancing speak for itself.”

“Right,” Deanna said, nodding. “Right. I see that, actually, I really do. No worries, OK? I won’t stay here and bother you –”

“However,” Castiel interrupted, reaching out and laying a hand on Deanna’s arm to still her, “I could, perhaps, break that rule.”

“What – really?” Deanna said, incredibly aware of Castiel’s touch on her arm. “You’d do that?”

“I’ve been told many times that the press is filled with people who are only out for themselves,” Castiel said. “Who’ll twist what I say to suit their story. My career in ballet is important to me and I can’t afford bad press. So I’ll only do the story if you answer a question for me.”

“Uh, right. OK,” Deanna said, frowning. Castiel was coming off a little domineering. Still, if she really did have a bright future ahead of her, maybe she was right to want to be in control of how she appeared in articles about her. “Go ahead, ask away.” She could give the question a stab, anyway.

“Are you a good person?” Castiel asked. Her hand had drifted off Deanna’s arm, and floated back down by her side. Her eyes were wide and innocent, touched with just a hint of complex humour. Deanna stared at her, dumbfounded, suddenly aware that she was talking with someone that she didn’t understand at all.

“Am I a good person?” she repeated, to give herself time to think. Should she lie, or tell the truth? What even  _was_ the truth? She’d done bad things in her life, like most people had. She drank a little too much and she didn’t always turn up to work on time and she’d once punched a guy for beating her at darts. She liked it when things got a little rowdy. But she took care of the people who were important to her – Sam, and Charlie, and Jo. And she always meant well. Did that count as being good?

“I – I do my best,” she said, eventually. “I try to help people. I care about – about stuff that happens.” She bit her lip, wanting to kick herself. The answer was lame, and Castiel would see right through it.

But then –

“Good,” said Castiel. “Where do you want to start?”

“Um,” Deanna said, mouth hanging open, barely able to believe her luck. “Um, coffee? I mean, we could talk about – about ballet over coffee. There doesn’t have to be coffee. The ballet is the important part, not the… coffee.”

“I like the sound of coffee,” Castiel said, with another tiny smile. “Let me get changed, and I’ll meet you in the lobby. We can go to a place around the corner, the coffee here is –”

“Disgusting, yeah,” Deanna finished. They smiled at each other, gazes holding, before Castiel turned to go. Watching her walk away, Deanna was struck again with that sense of awe; she couldn’t believe that this was real, that she was going on a – well, not a date, an interview, but – she was going to get to spend time with Castiel, get to know her a bit, and… well, who knew what could happen? Maybe by the end of it, she’d even like ballet.

Maybe, Deanna thought, remembering the way that Castiel had looked as she stood perfectly still on the spot, as she leapt, as she spun… just  _maybe_ , she already did.


End file.
